High-hope and low-hope research participants (males and females), as preselected on the basis of a dispositional self-report scale, choose freely between brief audiotaped messages that varied in depressive content. In the first experiment, the messages were of either positive or negative content. Highhope as compared to low-hope persons preferred listening to the positive tapes (no differences related to Gender), and this Hope main effect remained after the shared variance related to depression and positive and negative affectivity were removed. In a (...) modified replication, the contents of the tapes were comprised of successful or unsuccessful goal-attainment statements related to hopeful thinking. High-hope as compared to low-hope persons again preferred to listen to the successful goal pursuit messages (no differences related to Gender), and this Hope main effect on listening choices remained after the shared variances related to depression, positive and negative affectivity, and self-esteem were removed. Implications are discussed. (shrink)

An Integrative Model of Moral Deliberation suggests that the inadequacy of models of moral deliberation to deal effectively with contemporary moral complexity is a result of the lack of an inadequate theory of moral cognition. Drawing from work in neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, social theory, dual process cognitive theory, and the work of William James, this book develops a theory of moral cognition to be used as the basis for a model of moral deliberation. This model portrays moral deliberation as a (...) back and forth movement between intuitive and analytic cognitions, by which narrative scenarios are constructed and then assessed by aesthetic sensibilities. (shrink)

Abstract.Human altruistic behavior has received a great deal of scientific attention over the past forty years. Altruistic‐like behaviors found among insects and animals have illumined certain human behaviors, and the revival of interest in group selection has focused attention on how sacrificial altruism, although not adaptive for individuals, can be adaptive for groups. Curiously, at the same time that sociobiology has placed greater emphasis on the value of sacrificial altruism, Protestant ethics in America has moved away from it. While Roman (...) Catholic ethics has a longstanding tradition emphasizing an ordering of love, placing love of self second only to love for God, Protestant ethics in America has adopted a similar stance only recently, replacing a strong sacrificial ethic with one focusing on mutual regard for self and others. If sociobiology is correct about the significance of sacrificial altruistic behaviors for the survival of communities, this shift away from sacrificial agape by American Christianity may cut the community off from important resources for the development of a global ethic crucial for the survival of that faith community and humankind itself. (shrink)

Human altruistic behavior has received a great deal of scientific attention over the past forty years. Altruistic-like behaviors found among insects and animals have illumined certain human behaviors, and the revival of interest in group selection has focused attention on how sacrificial altruism, although not adaptive for individuals, can be adaptive for groups. Curiously, at the same time that sociobiology has placed greater emphasis on the value of sacrificial altruism, Protestant ethics in America has moved away from it. While Roman (...) Catholic ethics has a longstanding tradition emphasizing an ordering of love, placing love of self second only to love for God, Protestant ethics in America has adopted a similar stance only recently, replacing a strong sacrificial ethic with one focusing on mutual regard for self and others. If sociobiology is correct about the significance of sacrificial altruistic behaviors for the survival of communities, this shift away from sacrificial agape by American Christianity may cut the community off from important resources for the development of a global ethic crucial for the survival of that faith community and humankind itself. (shrink)

Serious Play provides a rich, multilayered argument that engages and contributes to contemporary theory and cultural studies.--Victorian Studies.

Lewis signaling games illustrate how language might evolve from random behavior. The probability of evolving an optimal signaling language is, in part, a function of what learning strategy the agents use. Here we investigate three learning strategies, each of which allows agents to forget old experience. In each case, we find that forgetting increases the probability of evolving an optimal language. It does this by making it less likely that past partial success will continue to reinforce suboptimal practice. The learning (...) strategies considered here show how forgetting past experience can promote learning in the context of games with suboptimal equilibria. (shrink)

This study investigates the differences in individuals'' ethical decision making between Canadian university business students and accounting professionals. We examine the differences in three measures known to be important in the ethical decision-making process: ethical awareness, ethical orientation, and intention to perform questionable acts. We tested for differences in these three measures in eight different questionable actions among three groups: students starting business studies, those in their final year of university, and professional accountants.The measures of awareness capture the extent to (...) which respondents felt that a particular action was unethical according to each of several ethical criteria. We found few differences between the two student groups on these measures, suggesting that their education had minimal effect on raising their awareness of the ethical issues in the vignettes. Indeed, overall, the graduating student''s scores were marginally lower than those of the entry-level students. However, the professionals viewed some actions as significantly less ethical than did the graduating students. (shrink)

The reception history of the French Revolution in France and England is well documented among Anglophone scholars; however, the debate over the Revolution in Germany is much less well known. Fichte's Contribution played an important role in this debate. Presented here for the first time in English, Fichte's work provides a distinctive synthesis of Locke's "possessive individualism," Rousseau's general will, and Kant's moral philosophy. This eclectic blend results in an unusual rights theory that at times veers close to a form (...) of anarchism. Written in 1792–93, just before Fichte moved to Jena to develop his philosophical system in a series of works—above all the Wissenschaftslehre of 1794—the Contribution provides invaluable insight into Fichte's early development. In addition, Fichte's work predates much of Kant's political philosophy, and can shed light on the rich dialogue in German political thought in the 1790s. (shrink)

Entrepreneurship is a critical need in society, and an entrepreneur's life can be a life wonderfully lived. However, most of the literature examining entrepreneurship takes an overly narrow financial viewpoint when examining entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial success. Our paper surveys the current entrepreneurial literature on what constitutes successful entrepreneurship. We then engage key conceptual ideas within the Catholic social tradition to analyze what we see as an undeveloped notion of success. We then move to construct a richer notion of success through (...) the framework of virtue. (shrink)

Over the last two decades, scientific accounts of religion have received a great deal of scholarly and popular attention both because of their intrinsic interest and because they are widely as constituting a threat to the religion they analyse. The Believing Primate aims to describe and discuss these scientific accounts as well as to assess their implications. The volume begins with essays by leading scientists in the field, describing these accounts and discussing evidence in their favour. Philosophical and theological reflections (...) on these accounts follow, offered by leading philosophers, theologians, and scientists. This diverse group of scholars address some fascinating underlying questions: Do scientific accounts of religion undermine the justification of religious belief? Do such accounts show religion to be an accidental by-product of our evolutionary development? And, whilst we seem naturally disposed toward religion, would we fare better or worse without it? Bringing together dissenting perspectives, this provocative collection will serve to freshly illuminate ongoing debate on these perennial questions. (shrink)

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 3, Page 333-348, May 2022.

Conservation can occur anywhere regardless of scale, political jurisdiction, or landownership. We present a framework to help managers at protected areas practice conservation at the scale of relationships. We focus on relationships between stakeholders and protected areas and between managers and other stakeholders. We provide a synthesis of key natural resources literature and present a case example to support our premise and recommendations. The purpose is 4-fold: 1) discuss challenges and threats to conservation and protected areas; 2) outline a relationship-scale (...) approach to address conservation threats; 3) describe the tools and techniques that can be used to implement this approach; and 4) present a case example from rural Alaska, USA, to illustrate relationship-scale conservation. Our case example illustrates how aspects of this approach to conservation were applied to address a wildlife population decline. Tools needed to implement relationship-scale conservation include 1) collecting and documenting narratives of place; 2) measuring and monitoring trust and commitment; and 3) identifying and mitigating threats. We recommend that planners and managers, working with their research partners, redefine and refocus their goals and objectives to include these practices. Doing so will enable them to gain substantial applied knowledge about their stakeholders and foster and maintain place relationships as desired outcomes of conservation. The ultimate outcome is a better prognosis for long-term global survival of protected areas and biodiversity. Published 2014. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA. (shrink)

Publication de deux poèmes byzantins du 12ème s. attribués à Théodore Prodomos, qui fournissent un certain nombre de renseignements sur les tentes des camps d'hiver des Comnène, et en particulier sur celle de la maison d'Irène la Sevastokratorissa. Cette étude mène l'auteur à un commentaire historico-artistique des éléments décrits: il compare d'abord ceux-ci avec l'art des 11ème et et 12ème s., et particulièrement avec l'art profane, puis il s'interroge sur l'authenticité des descriptions par rapport aux figures de rhétorique employées dans (...) ces textes. (shrink)

This article presents empirical evidence to address how some visitors build relationships with a wildland place over time. Insights are drawn from qualitative interviews of recreation visitors to the backcountry at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. The article describes relationship to place as the active construction and accumulation of place meanings. The analysis is organized around three themes that describe how people develop relationships to place: time and experience accrued in place, social and physical interactions in and with the (...) setting, and an active reflective process of regulating sense of identity to affirm commitment to place. (shrink)

Guiding our response in this essay is our view that current efforts to demarcate the role of the clinical ethicist risk reducing its complex network of authorizations to sites of power and payment. In turn, the role becomes susceptible to various ideologies—individualisms, proceduralisms, secularisms—that further divide the body from the web of significances that matter to that body, where only she, the patient, is located. The security of policy, standards, and employment will pull against and eventually sever the authorization secured (...) by authentic moral inquiry. Instead of asking “What do I need to know?”, the question animating the drive to standardize will be “What is the policy or standard?” The claims of the authors in this issue of HEC Forum confirm these suspicions. (shrink)

Captured in narrative textual form through open-ended and tape-recorded interview conversations, visitor experience was interpreted to construct a description of visitors' relationships to place while at the same time providing insights for those who manage the national park. Humans are conceived of as meaning-makers, and outdoor recreation is viewed as emergent experience that can enrich peoples' lives rather than a predictable outcome of processing information encountered in the setting. This process-oriented approach positions subjective well-being and positive experience in the ongoing (...) processes and activities that comprise our life pursuits rather than in particular end states toward which behaviors might be directed as in the case of end state frameworks. Several themes emerged in the interpretation across narratives including a relationship of stewardship/sense of respectful mitigation, socially constructed dimensions of the wilderness concept, which both converged with and deviated from definitions in The Wilderness Act of 1964, humans positioned as both part of wilderness and separate from it, description of a process whereby people form a relationship to protected places, and an awareness among visitors of the overarching management dilemma of how to balance human visitation with protection. Management insights and general implications that emerged from the overall interpretation such as using narrative illustration to enhance visitor education were summarized. It is suggested that the particularities of the setting, in conjunction with the process-oriented creation of meaning via varying levels of physical and social interaction with the setting each play important roles, perhaps at different times, for visitors' relationships to places within the Park. The process of forming long-term relationships to places is highlighted as the common thread running through the interpretation. The value of the national park is seen to lie in these relationships, which are time and context dependent, not necessarily in the attributes of the park, many of which are generic to other protected areas in North America. The dissertation concluded with an evaluation of this interpretation based on these implications and insights and provided direction for further research to learn about the processes involved with forming relationships to protected places. (shrink)

Access to a deep pool of talent is essential to the success of every professional services firm. The supply of that talent is contingent upon the available rewards for the exercise of that talent, and both the existence of the potential rewards and the beliefs that individuals hold about the existence of the rewards affect the decision to remain in the field. One structural factor that may affect the judgment about whether to remain in a profession concerns promotions based on (...) the gender of the employee. In this study, we examine the “glass ceiling” within the context of the accounting profession. While advances have been made within the accounting profession to address the glass ceiling, the continued existence—and perceptions about the continued existence—of the issue exert adverse effects upon the available talent pool and may create long-term problems for the profession. In this study, we investigate glass ceiling perceptions among a large sample of female accounting professionals employed in accounting; the sample includes both public accountants, and those employed in industry accounting. Our study yields the finding of beliefs in bias-driven effects, structural effects, and cultural effects among these accounting professionals. Glass ceiling perceptions are also influenced by several demographic factors. Furthermore, accounting professionals employed by industry are more likely to report a glass ceiling within their firms than accounting professionals employed by public accounting firms. The findings are of interest to researchers who explore gender-related issues in professional service firms such as the field of accounting, and to senior members of practice who are tasked with ensuring the integrity and quality of the talent pool and the equitable distribution of rewards to employees. (shrink)

Empirical investigation of legal systems is emerging as a leading trend in both the social sciences and the legal academy in the early twenty-first century. Law reviews are now filled with studies reporting empirical data. Because empirical investigation of law commonly seeks to inform contentious social and political debates, however, its research often fuels more debate than it resolves. Partisans on both sides of contentious issues now cite the same body of research to support their reform efforts. However, social science (...) research on law is not a useless undertaking, as it can sharpen debate. But the hope that the new empirical legal studies movement will become a neutral source of information for policy makers is unlikely to be realized. (shrink)

Constitutive reflexivity, stories, and personal narrative were used to interpret leisure experience and provide insights for understanding leisure identity. I present a personal narrative of an annual canoe camping trip on a forested backcountry river. Stories are told in first person by the author about his trip of twenty years on a river with a small group of men. The author illustrates how personal narrative allows opportunities for understanding and interpreting meanings and changing leisure identities. The confluence of narrative, identity, (...) and leisure experience is illustrated and discussed. The purpose is to bring the writer/researcher into the qualitative project as a subject and actor in the story and show how leisure identity images are created and affirmed through time. (shrink)

Sibley et al. (2008) report a recurrent neural network model designed to learn wordform representations suitable for written and spoken word identification. The authors claim that their sequence encoder network overcomes a key limitation associated with models that code letters by position (e.g., CAT might be coded as C‐in‐position‐1, A‐in‐position‐2, T‐in‐position‐3). The problem with coding letters by position (slot‐coding) is that it is difficult to generalize knowledge across positions; for example, the overlap between CAT and TOMCAT is lost. Although we (...) agree this is a critical problem with many slot‐coding schemes, we question whether the sequence encoder model addresses this limitation, and we highlight another deficiency of the model. We conclude that alternative theories are more promising. (shrink)

This paper provides a framework for the examination of cultural and socioeconomic factors that could impede the acceptance and implementation of a profession's international code of conduct. We apply it to the Guidelines on Ethics for Professional Accountants issued by the International Federation of Accountants (1990). To examine the cultural effects, we use Hofstede's (1980a) four work-related values: power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism, and masculinity. The socioeconomic factors are the level of development of the profession and the availability of economic (...) resources. We evaluate the applicability and relevance of the accounting guideline, and discuss the implications for accounting and other professions. (shrink)

Arbitrary state and corporate powers are helping to turn the Internet into a global surveillance dragnet. Responses to this novel form of power have been tepid and ineffective. Liberal critiques of surveillance are constrained by their focus on privacy, security and the underlying presupposition that freedom consists only of freedom from interference. By contrast, Foucauldian critiques rejecting liberalism have been well rewarded analytically, but have proven incapable of addressing normative questions regarding the relationship between surveillance and freedom. Quite apart from (...) these debates, neorepublicans have excavated a third concept of freedom, understood as non-domination. Could neorepublicanism overcome the limitations of liberal and Foucauldian critiques of surveillance? We argue, positively, that neorepublicanism can accommodate much of the Foucauldian analyses while also incorporating a normative critique of surveillance vis-à-vis freedom. We further argue, negatively, that surveillance power has outstripped the capacities of traditional republican institutional responses to domination. We conclude by considering ways in which neorepublicanism can be recalibrated to address the novelty of surveillance power while adhering to the ideal of non-domination. Two ways of addressing the problem are proposed: an offensive, dedicated surveillance antipower and a defensive republican amplification of privacy. (shrink)

Individual scapetribing is identified as pointing the finger of blame at organizations (or groups, institutions, and systems) as a means of excusing or inaccurately ascribing responsibility for one's own actions and their consequences. This type of behavior is shown to be related to corporate scape-goating as described by Wilson (1993). The paper addresses responsibility ascriptions and the importance of corporate responsibility as a significantly influential multi-person system.

Of Goals and Goods and Floundering About: A Dissensus Report on Clinical Ethics Consultation Content Type Journal Article Pages 275-291 DOI 10.1007/s10730-009-9101-1 Authors Jeffrey P. Bishop, Vanderbilt University Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society 2525 West End Avenue, Suite 400 Nashville Tennessee 37203 USA Joseph B. Fanning, Vanderbilt University Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society 2525 West End Avenue, Suite 400 Nashville Tennessee 37203 USA Mark J. Bliton, Vanderbilt University Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society 2525 West End Avenue, (...) Suite 400 Nashville Tennessee 37203 USA Journal HEC Forum Online ISSN 1572-8498 Print ISSN 0956-2737 Journal Volume Volume 21 Journal Issue Volume 21, Number 3. (shrink)

In this paper, a new method of quantitatively assessing continuity and discontinuity of visual attention is developed. The method is based on representing narrative information using graph theory. It is applicable to any type of narrative report. Since dream reports are often described as bizarre, and since bizarreness is partially characterized by discontinuities in plot, we chose to test our method on a set of dream data. Using specific criteria for identifying and arranging objects of visual attention, dream narratives from (...) 10 subjects were obtained and mapped onto graphs. The interrater reliabilities were 76% and 91% . Discontinuities in visual attention were quantified by plotting transitions from one part of a graph to another, which provided a spatiotemporal map of attention shifts within a narrative. This procedure was compared with other approaches to discontinuity and also applied to a set of 10 fantasy reports from the same subjects. The results showed that our method includes but transcends other approaches and has the capability to distinguish dream and fantasy reports. To our knowledge, the method provides the most rigorous and reliable measure to date of continuity and discontinuity of attention in narrative reports. (shrink)

This article places the concept of "right to know," which is normally associated with law, in a moral framework. It outlines multiple meanings of the concept, emphasizing the institutional nature of "right to know." Then the article imbeds this understanding in moral thinking, including a discussion of the moral elements of rights, and applies that understanding in specific journalistic situations.

To advance the philosophical debate of advertising's role in society, in this article I situate the natural tendencies of individuals that manifest themselves in economic relationships within the broader context of natural-law theory. I propose that a natural tendency to exchange goods underscores the classical liberal economic model. As a result, individuals have a natural inclination toward the use of persuasive rhetoric. In addition, as animale symbolicum, individuals have a natural tendency toward symbol use and creation, which in turn affects (...) the production and consumption of persuasive discourse. In light of these particular natural inclinations, I suggest that natural law can justify the institution of advertising. (shrink)

“Wrongful birth” is a controversial malpractice action, which has arisen in the past two decades, secondary to an expanding knowledge of human genetics and the constitutionally protected access to abortion. Under the wrongful birth claim, parents of a child with a congenital illness or abnormality may bring suit against a physician who allegedly failed to provide appropriate prenatal counseling or information. Typically, the parents claim that they were inadequately warned of a potential problem in their child, and that this paucity (...) of timely information prevented them from avoiding the pregnancy or from obtaining an abortion. While these cases have arisen in a variety of clinical circumstances, a characteristic example is the obstetrician who fails to offer amniocentesis to a woman of advanced maternal age who subsequently gives birth to a child with Down syndrome. Since the parents were prevented from learning of the abnormality and therefore exercising the option to terminate the pregnancy, they may claim damages for themselves for the wrongful birth of the infant. (shrink)

“Wrongful birth” is a controversial malpractice action, which has arisen in the past two decades, secondary to an expanding knowledge of human genetics and the constitutionally protected access to abortion. Under the wrongful birth claim, parents of a child with a congenital illness or abnormality may bring suit against a physician who allegedly failed to provide appropriate prenatal counseling or information. Typically, the parents claim that they were inadequately warned of a potential problem in their child, and that this paucity (...) of timely information prevented them from avoiding the pregnancy or from obtaining an abortion. While these cases have arisen in a variety of clinical circumstances, a characteristic example is the obstetrician who fails to offer amniocentesis to a woman of advanced maternal age who subsequently gives birth to a child with Down syndrome. Since the parents were prevented from learning of the abnormality and therefore exercising the option to terminate the pregnancy, they may claim damages for themselves for the wrongful birth of the infant. (shrink)